The MSSP Partner Program Profitability Effect

As cyber threats keep increasing in volume and sophistication, more partners are moving to participate in the managed services economy. Customers are dealing with staffing shortages, complex compliance requirements and business agility challenges in adopting newer technologies and fully utilizing their existing product stack. Managed security service providers (MSSPs) can help customers address these challenges by offering a comprehensive suite of IT services customized to meet an organization's specific needs and deliver high-quality and scalable services. As partners invest in building out their managed service offerings, it becomes imperative to make profitability a cornerstone of their strategy to stay competitive in the marketplace.

From a technology perspective, partners can affect their profitability in a variety of different ways:

1. Leveraging product and technology to drive automation: This allows the partner to reduce staffing and operating costs associated with the managed service. Depending on a partner's requirements, the Palo Alto Networks portfolio offers a wide range of machine learning and automation features that can help streamline product and service management, and can potentially reduce trouble tickets, among other outcomes.
2. Leveraging products and technology to drive offer differentiation over competitors: This allows a premium to be charged for the managed service offering. The Palo Alto Networks portfolio of products offers partners various insights that can help create a differentiated offering.

How the Palo Alto Networks NextWave Program Helps MSSP Partners Improve Service Profitability

The managed services market is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years as more organizations look to outsource IT operations to improve efficiency and control costs. Managed services give businesses peace of mind, by letting them know that someone is proactively monitoring and managing their IT infrastructure.

By partnering with Palo Alto Networks, MSSPs can access best-in-class tools and processes that they can leverage on behalf of their customers. They can deliver differentiated security services to market segments of all sizes and in every industry, broadening their footprint into new markets. Our MSSP program also offers our MSSP partners technical, business and marketing support. This enables them to ramp up quickly, deliver high-margin service profitably, and build out new top-of-mind service offerings around the consumerization of IT and cloud initiatives.

With managed services based on Palo Alto Networks, partners can achieve more:

• Build a repeatable, scalable service offer: The Palo Alto Networks NextWave MSSP Program team works to deliver new partner benefits targeted at accelerating the offer development process. New resources (designed for teams developing the managed service), such as MSSP in-a-box, can be found on the newly created MSSP Members Only Section in the Partner Portal.

Access the page or request access, today, to leverage service creation, service delivery, support and go-to-market resources to support your efforts to drive all the technical aspects of service offering management.

• Accelerate service readiness: Executing an enablement plan for delivery and TAC resources can help drive out staffing costs by improving deployment times and meantime-to-resolution of tickets. We have rolled out new MSSP Program compliance enablement metrics aligned to specific product areas, allowing partners to focus intensely on building expertise in a targeted area that aligns with their managed service.
• Engage around Service Lifecycle Management: Every partner's managed service is different and the profitability challenges they face are unique. MSSP partners must constantly innovate their service with new features to differentiate and stay ahead of their competition. To help partners stay abreast of these changes, we have introduced the monthly MSSP Momentum newsletter and a quarterly technical MSSP webinar, covering topics such as Panorama Single Pane-of-Glass and Cortex — solving customer's top SecOps challenges with MSSP managed services.

Partner-delivered managed services continue to grow as more customers outsource to support their business needs. Palo Alto Networks continues to innovate our products and programs to help our partners drive cost efficiency, business agility and growth. By joining the NextWave MSSP Partner Program, you can provide effective and differentiated managed security services that reduce cost, increase average revenue per customer and maximize the addressable market.

Learn more about the Palo Alto Networks NextWave MSSP Partner Program, Targeted Design Service for Technical Offer Development Consulting and our CPSP Program for Service Readiness.